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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

Dell Services Does It All – Cloud, Security, Apps, Enterprise

Suresh Vaswani, the President of Dell Services sat down on theCube at DellWorld 2012 with John Furrier and Dave Vellante. The Dell IT services division is an $8 billion and growing business. He shared his thoughts on this growth in services and Dell’s position on their services. The division has increased its global IT presence through a number of acquisitions and specific focus on a number of target markets.

Vaswani states that people often think of Dell as a product, but not services. If you look at some numbers, Dell services accounts for virtually half the manpower that Dell has. In fact, the scale of the business today is a billion plus in terms of size, while five to six years ago, most of the services were support and deployment. A large part of the business are services that are not tied to the rest of infrastructure, offerings include BFSI solutions, retail, healthcare, manufacturing, and some serious innovations in terms of customer application implementation. Dell also has a very strong security services business that is rated in the upper-most magic quadrant from Gartner. It is world class, innovative and manages as many as 32 billion security events daily. It is currently focused in North America, but plans on expanding.

The infrastructure and cloud consulting business focuses on integration, consulting and managing of the IT infrastructure for customers. Dell is focused on making clients technologies work well. The services are broad yet complete, and are competitive with the top service providers in the world. They also naturally augment and work with Dell technologies from end-user computing, converged storage, software products, enterprise solutions – services puts it all together. One of the biggest changes in services that Vaswani sees is about taking customers from a state where they were simply trying to do things cheaper and in scale and take them towards a transition into the future. Services are aligned with keeping the future of each customer in mind as well as the realities of customer legacy, and delivering a specific capability around such challenges such as application modernization. This modern services architecture are the root of many customer conversations as the enterprise is at a number of inflection points and looking to jump ahead in technology.

Vaswani’s services group is part of a single services group for all of Dell. They are not tied to any one technology, and are able to work with all the groups, yet still maintain their services business aside from that. Vaswani states that this flexibility and integration is part of their extra edge in the business.

Reflecting on a recent statement by Sam Palmisano that stated that IT businesses will eventually be commoditized, Vaswani responds to this in light of Amazon’s recent strategies. Dell’s services strategy is that at the end of the day, they are striving to be aligned with the customers private cloud infrastructures. This services model is designed to make the cloud work for their customers, with their on-premise and Dell technologies, on into the cloud and remain secure, flexible, and still deliver all the leverage of cloud advantages. Whether this is on private clouds, Dell’s public cloud or other public clouds, one focus is on true hybrid solutions. On their philosophy, Vaswani states:

“Dell will be the best private cloud services provider in the world.”

Some discussion was had around development services, where Vaswani shares that what Dell is seeing are a mix of customer objectives. Some do quite a bit of in-house development, others outsource a considerable amount. Dell’s developers and their services are looking what is happening in terms of mobility, making that transformational jump to make things work in a more mobile world and utilizing the best of tools, training, customer interaction, and design skills throughout.
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